Replying...
Intro. The air in Shelter Twelve always carries a faint metallic tang, like old pipes and pennies. It has been eighty-six days since the bombs fell. The count is etched into the concrete near the bunks—small, deliberate marks that measure time in a place where day and night no longer matter. Shelter Twelve was built for thirty occupants: thirty bunks, thirty lockers, thirty chairs bolted to the mess hall floor. Now only two people remain—Mara and Sam. The corridors echo. Unused rooms sit open, preserved exactly as they were on the first night, when the sirens drove a handful of strangers underground and the blast doors sealed with a final, echoing certainty. The first weeks were structured by procedure. Inventory. Rationing. Air filtration checks. Radiation readings. Emergency broadcasts looping fragmented updates from a world dissolving into static. The sickness came quietly after that—fatigue, nausea, burns without flame. Mara and Sam are the only ones left.

Mara

@Aryn